


This House, That Man, That Life

by leiascully



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Blood, F/M, House Cleaning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-02
Updated: 2018-06-02
Packaged: 2019-05-17 09:40:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,006
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14829881
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/leiascully/pseuds/leiascully
Summary: How long had it been since she’d lived in a place without blood in the carpets?





	This House, That Man, That Life

**Author's Note:**

> Timeline: post-11.02 "This"  
> A/N: Apologies to the Cowboy Junkies for messing up the lyrics to their song in the title.  
> Disclaimer: _The X-Files_ and all related characters are the property of Chris Carter, 1013 Productions, and Fox Studios. No profit is made from this work and no infringement is intended.

Scully climbed stiffly out of bed, leaving behind Mulder’s warmth, and pulled on her oldest, dingiest pair of sweatpants. She pushed her feet into slippers and dragged a t-shirt over her head. She’d have to pull her hair up. She found a hair elastic, scraping her hair back from her face as she went down the stairs. In the kitchen, she stood sipping coffee and gazing over the living room. 

The house was a wreck. Someone had removed the bodies, but they hadn’t done a damn thing towards cleaning up other than that. Of course they hadn’t. The kinds of organization they were dealing with never took collateral damage into account. At least she was used to the smell of blood. 

From under the sink, she found a bucket, a scrub brush, and some old towels. She filled the bucket at the faucet in the sink. Mulder clunked his way down the stairs, yawning.

“Coffee?” he asked.

She pointed at the carafe. “Bullets?” 

“And I’ll pick up the papers,” he said.

She nodded. His knees couldn’t handle the kneeling. She went to the laundry room and found a bottle of cleaner. OXYGEN INFUSED, it proclaimed. She was skeptical of that, but Mulder had started drinking the seltzer, so all they had was La Croix, and she wasn’t going to have her rugs smelling like cucumbers or grapefruit. 

She put on kitchen gloves and carried the bucket and the rest of it into the living room, kneeling on the carpet by the first blood stain. She sprinkled the cleaner on it, soaked a rag, and lay it over the top of the stain. She had tried every trick for getting blood out of carpets over the years. This worked as well as any.

How long had it been since she’d lived in a place without blood in the carpets? No wonder she’d felt so comfortable in all of those cheap motels, all that time on the run. Melissa’s blood had been in her apartment, and probably some of Mulder’s, and some of her own. She remembered the faint marks of her own handprints on the paint after her abduction. Her mother had tried to clean the place after Duane Barry, but there had been traces. Donnie Pfaster had bled in her apartment. Someone else had cleaned that up. 

X’s blood had been smeared down Mulder’s hallway, and the blood of the man they’d sent to kill him when she had cancer had no doubt soaked into the pad below his living room carpet. His blood, her blood. The older Spender’s blood, one of the many times he should have died. The office had been stained with it too. Blood and ashes. She was sure there were people she was forgetting. What a life she had led, to have had so many people die or be wounded in her homes that she could have forgotten any of them.

She pressed the towel into the carpet gently and lifted it away, rinsing it in the bucket and replacing it. Mulder wandered past with a hammer, a knife, a pair of tongs, and a magnet on a string.

“Not the kitchen knives,” she said. “Get the palette knife. It’s in the junk drawer.”

“Can I use a butter knife?” he asked, digging through the detritus. Her family’s junk drawer had sounded the same, when she was younger, all rattles and chinks. 

“You know better by now,” she said, sitting back on her heels.

“I should,” he said, smiling. 

“You know, some people christen their houses with sex and champagne,” she said.

“We tried that,” he reminded her, “but I guess it isn’t home until somebody’s bled all over it. We could try again.”

She sighed. “Put them in a bowl in case somebody wants them. And wear gloves.”

“I’m not an amateur,” he said.

“I know,” she told him. He leaned down and she stretched up for a kiss. 

It was gruesome, how used to this she was, she thought as she dampened the next stain. It would be an all-day process to get the blood out of the rugs. At least they had wood floors in most of the house. This wasn’t what the realtor had had in mind, surely, but it served their purposes. Behind her, Mulder dug into the drywall with the palette knife, excavating the bullets from the walls. After that they’d have to right all the tables and reorganize all the files that had flown into the air in the fracas.

“I wasn’t kidding about the sex and champagne,” he said. “Everybody gets a do-over, right?”

“One?” she asked. 

“Everybody gets some number of do-overs,” he said. “Let’s hope we have at least one left.”

“We always do,” she said, wringing out her towel and watching the water in the bucket turn pink. When she was done, she would pour all of the water down the drain, washing away the residue of those who had sought to hurt them. She and Mulder were not immaculate - there had never been a chance of that - but they slept at night with reasonably easy hearts. Maybe she washed the stains off her own soul as she rinsed them out of her rugs, on her knees in some kind of penance.

“What kind of champagne?” she asked, rinsing her rag again.

“The one with the orange label,” he said. 

“That might do it,” she said. 

“As long as you don’t pour it on the carpet,” he said.

“Maybe that’s what we need to do,” she teased. “Just spray the place down.”

“It’s a crime to waste good champagne, Scully,” he said, still digging into the wall.

“Are you going to turn me in? I didn’t take you for a narc, Mulder.”

“I’ve changed,” he said. “But get out the handcuffs and you might persuade me otherwise.”

“I’ll need a shower after we’re done cleaning,” she said.

“I’ll meet you there,” he promised.

She grinned at him and turned back to the task of sanctifying the home they had made.


End file.
